Substantiating your faith
Underlying topic(s):
- By John Eagles, August 12, 2006.
This page is part of an ERW course, Divine Principle.
- This entry can be read as a follow-up to Your own contribution to your own resurrection
What i am writing about here is really about ordinary life, that is: life as it should be. Religion is not firstly to be a member of an organization or to attend religious services. Religion is practicing love and understanding how to do that. It's getting to know about all aspects of life and learning how to live it well.
To make the resurrection of your own spirit a reality, you must build up your faith. This essentially is not faith in a church or in certain religious practices. The faith mentioned refers to the most internal quality of your heart and mind. It is faith in your own good self and your trust in a loving Higher Power.
I have spoken about making a Foundation of Faith to emphasize the reality that faith is not just something that falls from heaven but it has to be built up over time, by yourself, in a process of making offerings that basically are offerings of love.
So what happens when you have made such offerings correctly? Your foundation of faith grows. Your own faith grows. When you have more faith, new worlds may open to you. There is a saying that with faith you can move mountains. That's true in a sense. When you build up your faith with painstaking effort, day after day, you can change the world around you. Your own creativity will open like a flower in the first sun rays of the morning. You will get to know the spiritual world and your love for people and nature will bud.
There is one risk with faith that needs to be recognized. When you don't express your faith, when you don't make your faith substantial, you are apt to lose it again. After you made a foundation of faith, you have to substantiate it. It simply means that you have to express your faith by giving out love. After you built a foundation of faith, you should make a foundation of substance.
Before i explain more about how to make a foundation of substance, i want to make something clear about the terminology being used here. To develop ourselves as beings of love, we must fulfill certain tasks in life. Because we don't live as isolated individual beings, the process of building up love is not just an individual matter. It also is a group's process. Each group that wants establish certain ideals goes through the stages of building up a foundation of faith, a foundation of substance and yet another foundation, that is the foundation to follow God.
"Why does God not intervene in human life," is an often heard desperate question. God can intervene in our lives and in our society once we have adequately built up the foundations here explained. God does intervene in our lives when we people have built up these foundations in the right way. Basically, the foundations stand for love. We could also say: practice love and God will come. But we are complicated beings and to practice love is a difficult thing to do. The foundations explained here give some insight in how to express love, how to practice love and how to experience love.
The first foundation is the Foundation Of Faith (acronym FOF).
The second foundation is the Foundation Of Substance (acronym FOS).
The third foundation is the Foundation to Follow God (acronym FFG).
Now more about the Foundation of Substance (FOS). Love must be substantiated. Love means nothing when it is not expressed and returned.
Suppose you live in a group. This group might be a family or a group of friends. When you have built up a certain degree of faith in yourself, you need to pass this on to those around you. Faith essentially means faith in goodness. It means faith in yourself being good. It means faith in other people being good. Such faith is only possible by recognizing our real identity, which is that we are beings created by a good Creator.
Suppose that all people around are filled with hatred. Your own faith and love will suffer because of that hatred. This means that your own foundation of faith comes under threat. To prevent that from happening, you must find a second person to whom you pass on your love and faith. This is only possible if that second person also established a certain foundation of faith for himself or herself. You express good love to the other person, and this other person expresses good love to you. Usually there is a certain order here. One person goes ahead in faith to the other. The order is not just the most important though. What is important is that two people unite in love and faith centering on the same purposes.
Here comes about unity between two people living for the same ideals. This is called the Foundation of Substance. Your love and faith have become substantial, they have been expressed into real life. The force that is elicited here is enormous. Once two people have managed to make a Foundation of Substance they will draw to them more love, energy and help so they can fulfill their ideals.
In such a relation, lower emotions like envy or jealousy or resentment have been overcome. All major religions began with the unity between two people in such positions of unity. I mention just a few, Buddha and Ananda in Buddhism, Jesus and Peter in Christianity (later Jesus and Paul), Moses and Aaron (later Moses and Joshua) for Judaism.
When such a relation of a fulfilled Foundation of Substance comes under strain, troubles inevitably come to the organization they are setting up.
The Foundation of Faith essentially means love for God.
The Foundation of Substance essentially means love for other people.
Comment
Foundation of Faith and Foundation of Substance have originally nothing to do with any religion or any human ideal. 'Faith' means essentially faith in yourself as a good being. This faith also means to know your deepest divine essence. All love comes from such kind of faith. When you think you are bad, you cannot give out love to others. When such kind of faith grows in a person, that person wants to give out such love, just naturally, without any connection to a group or organization in the world. This happens in a family, it happens when two people meet each other. It also happens with the start of a new religion.
Foundation of Substance basically means to make your faith substantial, to express the love that is in your heart. It is that simple. But many people forget that love needs to be expressed. So it is important to mention it explicitly.
Now it gets more complicated when you apply it to religions of the past, because here many things went wrong already at the start. For example, Peter denied Jesus. Moses and Aaron were often very disunited. Here are far and deep causes of later problems in the religions they began.
When speaking about ideals: when people have original faith, that is they know their own divine origin, they always are able to unite with each other when they meet. That kind of faith stands high above the faiths of all kind of religions. Such kind of faith is found with religious believers of all kinds, but also in people who never heard of any of these. Such people naturally share the same ideals.
Personally i don't care so much about ideals professed by any established religions, except for what they share in an original way. Faith is always faith of the individual. You must know that you are good, i must know that i am good, and then you and i must practice that faith. (JE)
This article is part of a series of four
- Your own contribution to your own resurrection
- Substantiating your faith
- How to find deeper truth
- Inviting the Divine into your life
See also
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